Many Lives — One Love, by Fanny Butcher (1972)

For much of the mid-20th century, the Chicago Tribune was America’s biggest newspaper, and for much of that time, Fanny Butcher was its book editor and lead reviewer — which made her one of the most powerful personalities in American publishing and American literature of that time. But she saw herself far less as influencer than enthusiast, and that spirit pervades the pages of her memoir, Many Lives — One Love.

If you were to look at a typical lead page of the Tribune’s book section during the four decades when Butcher presided as editor, you would find a more eclectic and less splenetic assortment of news and reviews than in any of today’s ever-dwindling number of newspaper or magazine book sections. This is in part a reflection of Butcher’s view of her job as book editor. She was less critic than reporter. Having come up through the ranks of the Tribune’s reporting staff starting in the late 1910s — a time when there were few women reporters and most of them relegated to the society pages — Butcher put readership ahead of all other concerns:

A scholarly review must be contemplative and philosophical about both the subject matter and its treatment, and it may rightly be minutely argumentative. But that kind of review in a newspaper is simply not read by men on the eight-fifteen or women looking through the paper over a cup of coffee after the children have been packed off to school. And if a review isn’t read, it defeats its own main purpose, which is, in any kind of media, destined for no matter what audience, to entangle and stimulate the reader’s interest and to help the reader decide whether the book is one he wants to spend his time reading. It’s as simple as that.

Though she never addresses it directly, one reason Fanny Butcher survived so long in her position was a natural gift for getting along with people. She kept herself in the good graces of the Tribune’s legendary owner, Colonel Robert McCormick, who always maintained a full stable of hobbyhorses, with a visceral hatred of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt holding pride of place. She fostered good but impartial relationships with leading publishers like Bennett Cerf, Alfred A. Knopf, and Horace Liveright, all of whom recognized the impact a favorable review could have on their sales. But most remarkably, she had a knack for establishing rapport with some of the prickliest writers of her time.

There aren’t many of the major writers from the 1920s to the 1950s who don’t make at least one appearance in Many Lives, One Love: Willa Cather; William Faulkner; Ernest Hemingway; T. S. Eliot; James Joyce; Rebecca West; Ford Madox Ford. And, not surprisingly, many of the best writers to start or pass through Chicago during this period: Ben Hecht, Thornton Wilder, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and, most of all, Carl Sandburg.

Considering that Butcher’s own tastes ran decidedly middlebrow — she once described Eliot’s The Waste Land as the dumpings from his wastebasket — it’s surprising to discover that she hit it off with Gertrude Stein and kept up a warm friendship with Stein and Alice B. Toklas from the 1920s to Stein’s death (and with Toklas after that). She describes Stein’s prose in terms that many who’ve attempted it will recognize: “Every now and then, I would feel that there was something of the surge of the sea in her writing, the characteristic rote, of advancing, receding always in rhythm, always proceeding toward the shore of understanding, never bashing it directly with direct prose.”

To her credit, Butcher never dismissed what she could not fully comprehend. She once wrote that Virginia Woolf’s Orlando was “the most cerebral novel of the year. That it is, therefore, the most alluring to some and the least to others is also true beyond a doubt.” And thirty years later, she argued that though to most Americans, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was “distasteful,” there was no doubt that “its author can write.”

Though she usually found something admirable in most of the books she reviewed, Butcher was capable of cutting through to bone if the subject deserved it. Of The White Flag (1923) by the then-hugely popular Gene Stratton Porter, she wrote, “It is simply unbelievably terrible.” She also regularly called out the many novels of the 1920s and 1930s that struggled with an affliction all too common then: being too long. Whether the fault lay principally with authors, publishers, or book buyers — or should be apportioned in equal measure to all three — the fact is that many good but not great novels of that time should have been slashed from 350 or 400 pages to slightly over 200.

Fanny Butcher was a born diplomat of the book world. When the Tribune ran a Christmas feature in which the likes of Hemingway, Sandburg, and Richard Nixon were asked to name their five favorite books, she responded instead with a recollection of five favorite book-related moments in her life, starting with an aunt’s gift of Black Beauty and her first library card. That conscientiousness leads to a few drawbacks in Many Lives, One Love, most obvious of which is its checklist structure. The “Many Lives” become the basis of most of the book’s chapters: “My Life in Politics”; “My Life in Music”; “My Life in France”; “My Life in the South”; “My Life as a Joiner.”

These are followed by sketches of some of her most notable acquaintances — Willa Cather, H. L. Mencken, Edna Ferber — and then wrapped up with “My Life in Senescence,” which is less wistful than irascible: “You have to be as old as I am to remember when there were no frozen dinners in supermarkets because there were neither electric refrigeration nor supermarkets.” Butcher’s readers would have been better served had she heeded her own criticism of too-long books and simply tossed out those chapters that read less like recollections and more like inventories. Still, if you’re looking for someone to follow on a journey through a healthy share of 20th American literature, you could do worse than choosing Fanny Butcher’s Many Lives, One Love.

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Many Lives, One Love, by Fanny Butcher
New York: Harper and Row, 1972